If our reviewers had ballots, here's how they would vote in the top eight categories.

PETER DEBRUGE

BEST PICTURE: “12 Years a Slave.” What an incredible lineup! Apart from “American Hustle” (a blatant knockoff of Scorsese’s superior, Oscar-unrewarded “Goodfellas”) and Scorsese’s own equally unwieldy “The Wolf of Wall Street,” I would be happy to see any of these films go home victorious. And yet, “12 Years a Slave” strikes me as an achievement above the rest, inviting people to empathize with a human being caught at the center of a system whose implications and aftermath society still refuses to confront. Considering Hollywood’s belief in the healing power of Holocaust movies, it’s scandalous how long America’s slaveholding legacy had gone unexamined — until now.

BEST DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuaron, “Gravity.” Though I know some are predicting “Gravity” for the top prize, direction is surely the category where this mind-blowing, mostly virtual achievement most warrants recognition. Cuaron delivers a visceral cinematic experience nonpareil, impressively managing to juggle existential themes alongside technological innovation. I was also impressed with the relative intimacy of Spike Jonze’s sci-fi work on “Her” this year, but he’s not on the ballot, so Cuaron takes the prize.

BEST ACTOR: Matthew McConaughey, “Dallas Buyers Club.” If I ran the zoo, my write-in vote would go to “Inside Llewyn Davis” lead Oscar Isaac, who brought warmth and relatability to a superficially dislikable character. Among the nominees, McConaughey impressed me for much the same reason. The challenging physical transformation he underwent to play an emaciated 135-pound AIDS patient pales in comparison with the transformation his character experiences, evolving from a racist, homophobic bigot to an unlikely hero in the fight against HIV.

BEST ACTRESS: Cate Blanchett, “Blue Jasmine.” Judi Dench and Meryl Streep always impress, while Sandra Bullock aces the mechanical complexities of acting in a void, but the winner here is Blanchett. The Aussie star just may be the best actress of her generation, yet there are simply too few roles deserving of her talent. Thankfully, Woody Allen had the wisdom to think of her when casting this Tennessee Williams-worthy wreck, and Blanchett delivers, baring the vodka-soused social-climber’s every insecurity.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jared Leto, “Dallas Buyers Club.” From “Tootsie” to “Shakespeare in Love,” the Academy loves to reward movie stars for cross-dressing, buying into the gender-bending charade with a wink. But Leto never feels the need to remind audiences that it’s all an act, liberating the resilient Southern gal within, while erasing any trace of his real-world self. In contrast with the case of “The Crying Game’s” Jaye Davidson, the shock isn’t the character’s true gender, but how easily we relate to her plight.

BEST ACTRESS: Lupita Nyong’o, “12 Years a Slave.” I can’t fathom a scenario in which Kenyan ingenue Nyong’o doesn’t win. Like Patsey, who picks 500 pounds of cotton a day, the actress pulls far more than her weight in “12 Years a Slave.” She’s the face of unfathomable tragedy — objectified and abused, yet dignified through it all. In the end, as Solomon Northup rides off to freedom, it is Nyong’o and the flash of a fainting yellow dress that leaves us wondering about Patsey’s fate.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Spike Jonze, “Her.” I have a hunch that “American Hustle” will take this statue, despite its eagerness to subvert writing with improvised anarchy. That would be a shame, as Spike Jonze ought to be rewarded for conjuring a relationship out of thin air in “Her,” a film where the year’s most enchanting character consists of little more than words.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: John Ridley, “12 Years a Slave.” Historically speaking, there was so much riding on “12 Years a Slave,” which elevates a rare first-person account of forced servitude to epic status. Had the result faltered, Hollywood would have happily swept the subject back under the rug, but the film succeeds due to the balance between director Steve McQueen’s heightened, unflinching style and John Ridley’s incredibly humane treatment of Solomon Northup’s experience.

SCOTT FOUNDAS

BEST PICTURE: “Her.” Spike Jonze’s neo-futuristic techno-romance was my favorite film of last year, and the one that may grow largest over time, not unlike Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” 30 years before. But I still think, as I have for months, that it’s going to be “12 Years a Slave” for the win. Because the Oscar-season soothsayers need a narrative to keep themselves occupied, they’ve created one in which it was supposed to be a big surprise that Steve McQueen’s powerful slavery drama won the Golden Globe, and then another big surprise when it won the BAFTA. Will it still be a surprise when it wins Oscar too?

BEST DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuaron, “Gravity.” Until the visual and sound effects were rendered and the music put in place, “Gravity” was little more than some silent shots of Sandra Bullock hanging inside a custom-built LED “light box,” moving through imaginary space. The one place the completed movie existed was in the vast imagination of Cuaron, who both will and deserves to win for a stunning big-screen vision in the age of ever smaller screens.

BEST ACTOR: Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Not a dud performance in this fiercely competitive bunch. The consensus seems to be that this is Matthew McConaughey’s award to lose, as much for his excellent work in “Dallas Buyers Club” as for the transformative arc of his entire career over the past three years. It’s DiCaprio, though, who gets my vote for an electrifying, full-bodied performance that revealed him to be an unexpectedly deft comedian. He leaves a pound of flesh on that screen. With any other actor, “Wolf” seems inconceivable.

BEST ACTRESS: Amy Adams, “American Hustle.” This one’s neck-and-neck for me: I enormously admired Cate Blanchett’s schizophrenic high-wire act at the center of Woody Allen’s recession-era morality play, and still believe she’s got this one all sewn up, recent headlines notwithstanding. However, I’m casting my own imaginary ballot for the consistently remarkable Adams — already a five-time nominee at age 39 — who was the stealth weapon in “American Hustle’s” finely tuned ensemble, deft and heartbreaking as the con woman juggling two men, and two personalities, until she begins to lose track of who she really loves, and who she really is.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jared Leto, “Dallas Buyers Club.” Actors always get a lot of attention when they gain or lose a lot of weight for a role, or affect a disability, or appear in drag — and often, no matter how good they are, you can still see all the architecture that went into building the performance. But appearing on screen for the first time in four years, Leto simply seemed to be Rayon from the first frames of “Dallas Buyers Club” to the genuinely astonishing scene when he dons a suit and tie to meet with his banker father — the only moment in the film when we feel we’re watching someone wearing makeup. He’ll win this one, and deserves to.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Lupita Nyong’o, “12 Years a Slave.” It’s always thrilling to make a new discovery at the movies, and there were few in 2013 that could rival Nyongo, who walked right out of Yale drama school and onto the set of “12 Years,” where she was utterly spellbinding as the literal love slave who begs Solomon Northup for her salvation. She gave an often austere, tough-minded movie about the economy of slavery its heart, and if anyone pulls off an upset in this category against favorite Jennifer Lawrence, it’ll be her.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell, “American Hustle.” Because the Academy has often used its screenplay statuettes as consolation prizes for well-liked movies that aren’t going to win anything else, Spike Jonze may well score here for “Her,” and who’s to begrudge him? But for the sheer musicality of its dialogue, volume of quotable lines, and sharply drawn characters each with his or her own inimitable patois, “American Hustle” was easily the most purely pleasurable movie to listen to since “The Social Network.” Somewhere, Ben Hecht is smiling.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: John Ridley, “12 Years a Slave.” Distilling Solomon Northup’s sprawling memoir into a taut two-hour narrative was no mean feat, but Ridley (“Three Kings”) managed to do so while crafting a distinctive, slightly formal and stylized language for the characters to speak, further pulling us into the film’s vividly atmospheric world. Outside best picture, this is “12 Years’” best shot at the gold.

JUSTIN CHANG

BEST PICTURE: “Gravity.” The backlash has already set in — rarely have words like “thrill ride” and “visual stunner” been deployed with such contempt. But long after the thrills have receded into familiarity, the spiritual dimensions of “Gravity” and the catharsis of Sandra Bullock’s performance reverberate all the more profoundly. An astonishing marriage of cutting-edge form and old-fashioned content, Alfonso Cuaron’s white-knuckle survival thriller casts us into the forbidding emptiness of space and then reassures us, with infinite tenderness, beauty and wonder, that we can go home again.

BEST DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuaron, “Gravity.” What a wizard Cuaron has become, and what a high bar he has set for any artist who would dare venture into the potential minefield of blockbuster moviemaking. The latest in an unbroken string of pop-auteur triumphs that began with “Y tu mama tambien,” “Gravity” is the rare computer-generated spectacle whose creator’s soulful imprint can be felt in every glorious shot.

BEST ACTOR: Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Had Robert Redford, Oscar Isaac and Tom Hanks gotten the nominations they deserved, the choice might not have been so clear-cut. Even still, I’d say DiCaprio deserves this for the Quaalude sequence alone: Whether he’s riveting his disciples on the trading-room floor or turning his body into a comic vessel of Jerry Lewis-esque proportions, this movie star has never been more commanding, more who-knew-he-had-this-in-him electrifying, than as the rotten, resplendent core of Martin Scorsese’s latest gangster drama.

BEST ACTRESS: Cate Blanchett, “Blue Jasmine.” There’s a reason she’s been the frontrunner from day one. Seething with fury one minute, dissolving into self-pity the next, exposing every last nerve ending and then some, Blanchett doesn’t just dazzle us with bravura technique. No less than Amy Adams in “American Hustle,” she dramatizes the desperate human compulsion to turn life itself into one grand illusion, revealing how, for one fallen Park Avenue socialite named Jasmine French, the appearance of success is the performance of a lifetime.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Michael Fassbender, “12 Years a Slave.” Jared Leto is a shoo-in here for his work in “Dallas Buyers Club,” an admittedly astonishing transformation that has sucked up most of the critical oxygen in this category. Me, I’m partial to Fassbender’s terrifying (at times almost too terrifying) turn as a malevolent, morally diseased slave owner who earns our condemnation but somehow eludes our contempt. He’d get my vote even if he hadn’t been so egregiously snubbed for “Shame.”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Sally Hawkins, “Blue Jasmine.” Not a weak link in this category: powerhouse turns by Jennifer Lawrence and Lupita Nyong’o; sterling, vanity-free character work by Julia Roberts and June Squibb. But Hawkins is the one I was happiest to see pop up here: As the grounded yin to Blanchett’s fiery yang, this superb British actress invests what could have been a blue-collar, tough-gal caricature with great warmth, resilience and dignity. She’d get my vote even if she hadn’t been so egregiously snubbed for “Happy-Go-Lucky.”

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Spike Jonze, “Her.” I won’t be too upset if David O. Russell and Eric Warren Singer triumph for “American Hustle,” a screwball epic so thrillingly unencumbered by three-act structural niceties, it fooled some into thinking it didn’t have a script. Still, if we’re talking originality, it’s hard to beat Jonze’s marvelous futuristic conceit, a man-meets-machine love story that never threatens to sink beneath the weight of its staggering metaphorical implications.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, “Before Midnight.” Droll or spontaneous, purposeful or meandering, the rolling rhythms of human conversation are rarely as engrossing as they are in “Before Midnight,” the culmination of a series that has grown funnier, sadder, wiser and more piercingly human with each installment. This masterly collaboration was easily the best movie I saw in 2013; a screenwriting prize from the Academy is the very least it deserves.

I think most of these predictions will be wrong, especially for Best Picture. You all should check out my programs called “Best Picture Predictor.” You can YouTube it or forward slash vFnT-Ov_7_0. The calculations I used to create this app predicted the right winner 12 years straight, starting with A Beautiful Mind all the way until Argo. Look up my video and see what my program predicts for 2013.